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Bandit algorithms sequentially accumulate data using adaptive sampling policies, offering flexibility for real-world applications. However, excessive sampling can be costly, motivating the devolopment of early stopping methods and reliable…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-02-06 Zihan Cui

We introduce a framework for Thompson sampling (TS) contextual bandit algorithms, in which the algorithm's ability to quantify uncertainty and make decisions depends on the quality of a generative model that is learned offline. Instead of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Kelly W. Zhang , Tiffany Tianhui Cai , Hongseok Namkoong , Daniel Russo

Thompson sampling (TS) is widely used for stochastic multi-armed bandits, yet its inferential properties under adaptive data collection are subtle. Classical asymptotic theory for sample means can fail because arm-specific sample sizes are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Shunxing Yan , Han Zhong

We consider the Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem, where an agent sequentially chooses actions and observes rewards for the actions it took. While the majority of algorithms try to minimize the regret, i.e., the cumulative difference between…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-14 Nadav Merlis , Shie Mannor

A contextual bandit is a popular framework for online learning to act under uncertainty. In practice, the number of actions is huge and their expected rewards are correlated. In this work, we introduce a general framework for capturing such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-07 Imad Aouali , Branislav Kveton , Sumeet Katariya

We consider the exploration-exploitation tradeoff in linear quadratic (LQ) control problems, where the state dynamics is linear and the cost function is quadratic in states and controls. We analyze the regret of Thompson sampling (TS)…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-03-28 Marc Abeille , Alessandro Lazaric

We study the stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with the graph-based feedback structure introduced by Mannor and Shamir. We analyze the performance of the two most prominent stochastic bandit algorithms, Thompson Sampling and Upper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-17 Thodoris Lykouris , Eva Tardos , Drishti Wali

We propose a linear contextual bandit algorithm with $O(\sqrt{dT\log T})$ regret bound, where $d$ is the dimension of contexts and $T$ isthe time horizon. Our proposed algorithm is equipped with a novel estimator in which exploration is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2023-03-30 Wonyoung Kim , Myunghee Cho Paik , Min-hwan Oh

We present a new algorithm for the contextual bandit learning problem, where the learner repeatedly takes one of $K$ actions in response to the observed context, and observes the reward only for that chosen action. Our method assumes access…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-10-15 Alekh Agarwal , Daniel Hsu , Satyen Kale , John Langford , Lihong Li , Robert E. Schapire

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

We here adopt Bayesian nonparametric mixture models to extend multi-armed bandits in general, and Thompson sampling in particular, to scenarios where there is reward model uncertainty. In the stochastic multi-armed bandit, the reward for…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-26 Iñigo Urteaga , Chris H. Wiggins

Contextual bandits are a form of multi-armed bandit in which the agent has access to predictive side information (known as the context) for each arm at each time step, and have been used to model personalized news recommendation, ad…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-05-25 Aniket Anand Deshmukh , Urun Dogan , Clayton Scott

Contextual bandits serve as a fundamental model for many sequential decision making tasks. The most popular theoretically justified approaches are based on the optimism principle. While these algorithms can be practical, they are known to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-03-17 Botao Hao , Tor Lattimore , Csaba Szepesvari

In settings where the application of reinforcement learning (RL) requires running real-world trials, including the optimization of adaptive health interventions, the number of episodes available for learning can be severely limited due to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-03 Karine Karine , Susan A. Murphy , Benjamin M. Marlin

The multi-armed bandit problem forms the foundation for solving a wide range of on-line stochastic optimization problems through a simple, yet effective mechanism. One simply casts the problem as a gambler that repeatedly pulls one out of N…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-08-08 Sondre Glimsdal , Ole-Christoffer Granmo

Thompson sampling is an algorithm for online decision problems where actions are taken sequentially in a manner that must balance between exploiting what is known to maximize immediate performance and investing to accumulate new information…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-16 Daniel Russo , Benjamin Van Roy , Abbas Kazerouni , Ian Osband , Zheng Wen

We study the regret of Thompson sampling (TS) algorithms for exponential family bandits, where the reward distribution is from a one-dimensional exponential family, which covers many common reward distributions including Bernoulli,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-06-09 Tianyuan Jin , Pan Xu , Xiaokui Xiao , Anima Anandkumar

Thompson Sampling (TS) has attracted a lot of interest due to its good empirical performance, in particular in the computational advertising. Though successful, the tools for its performance analysis appeared only recently. In this paper,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Tomas Kocak , Michal Valko , Remi Munos , Shipra Agrawal

We consider the problem of stochastic $K$-armed dueling bandit in the contextual setting, where at each round the learner is presented with a context set of $K$ items, each represented by a $d$-dimensional feature vector, and the goal of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Aadirupa Saha , Aditya Gopalan

This work tackles the complexities of multi-player scenarios in \emph{unknown games}, where the primary challenge lies in navigating the uncertainty of the environment through bandit feedback alongside strategic decision-making. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Yingru Li , Liangqi Liu , Wenqiang Pu , Hao Liang , Zhi-Quan Luo